Introduction to Shrewd Samaritan: Faith, Economics, and the Road to Loving Our Global Neighbor
(Excerpt from the introduction to the book–now available July 2019.)
It’s been my experience that most people have a genuine desire to help the poor—including the poor in their communities and even the poor on the other side of the world. But it’s also been my experience that most people do not feel confident about the best ways to help.
That’s why I’ve written Shrewd Samaritan.
Shrewd Samaritan is for people who are wondering how they can have a meaningful and effective relationship with the global poor, the poor overseas, and the poor in our midst. It is about loving and caring for the poor in a way that moves past our best wishes and intentions, toward an engagement that bears fruit among the poor and in our lives as well. It is poverty work that is both heart and mind: kind like the Good Samaritan, but also shrewd in its discernment.
An important theme of this book is that effective poverty work is not simply a matter of becoming a more committed practitioner, missionary, donor, or activist. There are many who couldn’t be more committed to the welfare of the poor, but who are ineffective in their work or in their giving. Effective work with the poor begins with understanding the nature and causes of poverty, understanding why different types of interventions have been ineffective and effective, discerning one’s role in the larger picture, and then carefully and patiently using this knowledge to partner with others in facilitating change.
If you are an ordinary person living in a rich country with a regular job, a spouse, or kids (or none of the above) but who wants to understand how your life can positively impact someone living in poverty across the globe, this book is written for you. It will break down myths you may have been told about the causes of poverty, and myths about effective responses to it. It will help you to understand why rich countries are rich, the causes of inequality in rich countries like yours, and how to discern what your role in addressing poverty can be. It will give you some practical ways to make a big difference—even if you keep your day job.
If you are a development practitioner working for an NGO, this book is written for you. I will give you new frameworks for thinking about your work, about why some approaches you may take bear fruit and some never seem to. As a development economist, I also want to connect you in an engaging way with what the latest research finds to be effective and ineffective ways to address poverty. Some of this is research I have had the privilege of carrying out myself with colleagues, research that, along with looking at the long-term effects of Compassion International’s child sponsorship program, has examined the impact of the TOMS Shoes giving program in El Salvador, how the cleft palate surgeries of Operation Smile affect the lives of teenagers in India, the effects of Nestlé baby formula on infant mortality across the globe, how we can increase the impact of microcredit loans, and the role that hope and aspirations play in development more generally. But more than this, I would like to introduce you more broadly to the fascinating insights of a new generation of poverty researchers that is beginning to make significant inroads into understanding what kinds of approaches are genuinely effective at fighting poverty. One of my goals for this book is simply to help support you as a practitioner in your good work.
If you are a Christian or a person of faith, this book is for you. So am I. But you may be surprised at how much of what I present in this book appears to be “secular” in nature. This is true because good science helps us to do good poverty work, like a surgeon who is trying to understand the best ways to repair the human body. And I believe when it comes to fostering human dignity and human flourishing, there is no fully “secular” work. As the Jesuits have convinced me where I teach at the University of San Francisco, in the end fostering human dignity is all God’s work—whether we are conscious of that or not. And when we care for the poor, the scriptures say that we care for Christ himself, and this is a rather awesome thought.
If you are a non-religious person, this book is written for you. Maybe most especially for you. You may be mildly annoyed that I build a foundation on parables told by a first-century carpenter/rabbi. You may be puzzled by my references to spiritual things generally and the Judeo-Christian framework as both a motivation and framework for poverty interventions. But given the mounting new empirical evidence not only from the positive impact on economic development from historical missionary work, but from recent randomized controlled trials and quasi-experimental studies of faith-based interventions, this book may challenge your preconceptions that religion is irrelevant to economic development. Moreover, seeing economic development presented within a framework of human dignity and human flourishing may not only help you to communicate more effectively with your faith-based practitioner colleagues but also challenge the traditional secular approach that measures human development mainly in terms of statistics related to health, education, and income.
If you are committed to the global poor, I encourage you to read on whatever may be your background, to renew your commitment to the good fight of caring about the poor, and to consider the possibility of working more closely with those of us who have found that our Creator’s grace for our own brokenness has motivated our own foray into the brokenness of global poverty.
What is most important? That the needs of the needy are met or that we become the kind of people who meet the needs of the needy? There is no better place to be than playing one of the instruments in the symphony of redeeming a broken world. But part of this redemption is what God wants to do not only through us, but also in each of us as he uses us in this work. Christianity differs from many other religions in that it is not primarily about our personal purity or spiritual state of mind. It is not primarily about either rules or mountain-top spirituality.
Instead, our human purpose is to more and more deeply understand God’s grace for us, and to direct that grace toward our neighbor: the neighbor in our family, the neighbor in our community, and even our global neighbor—especially the neediest among these. The purpose of Shrewd Samaritan is to help us all move farther and better down that road. And if this is the road on which you would like to travel, this book is written for you.
Now available from Amazon, Apple iBooks, Barnes & Nobel, Audible, and more!
- On the Components of Human Flourishing
- When Should We Give Cash Rather than In-Kind Gifts to Those in Need?